Until I can block ads in web apps, I'll keep my browser thanks.
It’s time to kill the web app
11–20 of 717 posts
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#12I find this unconvincing.
Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average).
"Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's."
The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs.
"Web apps are impossible to secure."
Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is impossible to secure.
"Buffers that don’t specify their length"
Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web apps are built in languages that don't have buffer overrun problems. There are many classes of security bug to be found in web apps, some unique to web apps...I just don't think this is one of them. This was a common problem in those C/C++ programs from the 90s the author is seemingly pretty fond of. Not so much web apps built in PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/Perl/whatever.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#13Even though it's a bit forced, I agree that the whole mainstream computer field as a weird non ROI. Machines 10000x faster, personal value/productivity: flat or below.
> personal value/productivity: flat or below
Except for that there are a thousand times more computer users than there were 30 years ago, now that we have the computer power to render talking paperclips or whatever to make computers usable by the average person.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#14All the more reason to switch to Urbit. Have you accepted Curtis Yarvin into your heart as your personal BDFL yet?
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#15What about the fact that the Web platform isn't owned by any one company, but is supported (to varying degrees) by every major native platform? A shiny new app platform won't have that. That's important.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#16When you've got things like new multi threaded renderers, all browsers now 64bit, web assembly, service workers, faster processors etc. It seems that in actuality app development with web technologies is finally practical.
But, why are these things framed as an either or? Surely the best thing is always to use the best technology for the job and in many cases the speed and security trade off is worth it in order to utilise existing assets and expertise from a businesses web application.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#17All the more reason to switch to Urbit. Have you accepted Curtis Yarvin into your heart as your personal BDFL yet?
As soon as it does something useful, sure. As a power user I could not be any less interested in whatever I've been able to understand Urbit does.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#18What about the fact that the Web platform isn't owned by any one company, but is supported (to varying degrees) by every major native platform? A shiny new app platform won't have that. That's important.
In theory indeed. In practice there's 3 vendors and the standard defining organisation represents commercial interests in the platform, not you.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#19I sympathize with the sentiment, but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks.
Like any technology with decades of evolution it has a thick sediment of peat. Half of Javascript, half of Windows, even half of *nix is garbage you should never use, but it's all there because old things would stop working without it.
It's just that the web has a very low barrier to entry and very high reach, so the compost doesn't get thrown out as quickly as it should. So people still pack jQuery when they need to select elements, or pull a left pad from npm without realizing it's in the language core. Or pack Reactiflux when they want to do a form.
In an age where you can literally compile existing, GPU-heavy C++ code to WebAssembly and run it in the browser with no fuss, you can't complain the web doesn't let you do things right, or at least the way you want. It's just admittedly easy to hop on the wrong library bandwagon and complain when things go wrong. But it's not a problem with the web.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#20It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable.
I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a coherent mental model of the architecture of a web application or figure out what the best practices are for web development. The amount of complexity you have to wade through to get anything done is just silly.
There's the idea floating around that web developers are less competent than programmers on other platforms. I'm only half serious when I say this, but I sometimes wonder if, to the extent that this is true, it's because web developers have so much incidental complexity to deal with that there's just not much brainspace left over for classical CS or software development concepts.